When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (16 page)

As he neared the Mossad car, one of the Israeli operatives called ‘just a moment' before jumping on him. Eichmann was terrified. ‘He let out a terrible yell, like a wild beast caught in a trap.'

The other agents bundled Eichmann into the car and drove off at high speed. Eichmann was gagged and his hands and feet were tied together. He was told that he would be shot if he made a sound.

He was taken to a safe house where he was interrogated. He offered no resistance: indeed, he went out of his way to be helpful.

‘Gone was the SS officer who once had hundreds of men to carry out his commands,' recalled Harel. ‘Now he was frightened and nervous, at times pathetically eager to help.'

Eichmann was held for a week before he could be flown to Israel aboard an El Al flight. The Mossad agents pretended to be helping a brain-damaged patient return to Israel. They faked papers to this effect. To make the ruse more convincing, they drugged Eichmann and carried him onto the waiting plane.

Exactly eleven months after his capture, Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. He was indicted on fifteen criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people. Eichmann's only defence was that he was following orders.

It was not enough to save him. He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. He was hanged on the last day of May 1962, in an Israeli prison.

 

12

The Celebrity Executioner

It was Friday the 13th and there were thirteen prisoners, all of them awaiting execution: ten men and three women who had sent tens of thousands of concentration camp victims to their deaths. Now, it was their turn to die.

There was never any doubt as to who would undertake the executions. Albert Pierrepoint was Britain's most experienced hangman. He had first been given the job of executioner in 1932, following in the footsteps of his father and uncle. He proved so reliable and efficient that he was promoted to Chief Executioner in 1941. He turned his trade into an art, becoming an expert at double executions, hanging two men at the same time. Now, in December 1945, his services were required to carry out the numerous executions that followed the Nazi war crime trials. The most sensational of these was the hanging of the so-called ‘Beasts of Belsen'.

The ‘beasts' included Irma Grese, a twenty-one-year-old blonde dairy maid who had joined the SS and got herself transferred to Belsen, where she earned infamy for lashing her Jewish prisoners to death with her riding whip as they were on their way to the gas chambers.

Also convicted was Juana Bormann, who had treated her prisoners with horrific violence, setting her Alsatian dog onto the weak and sick. ‘First she egged the dog on and it pulled at the woman [victim's] clothes,' said one witness at her trial. ‘Then she was not satisfied with that and made the dog go for her throat.' She, like Irma Grese, was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

The Belsen executions were to be rather different from Pierrepoint's previous hangings. He usually worked with an assistant, but on this occasion he was put in charge of the entire process. It was a job that required meticulous planning. ‘I had to supervise the weighings and measuring of the condemned thirteen in order to work out my drops.'

When he first arrived at Bückeburg prison, where the criminals were being held, he was appalled to see that thirteen graves were already being dug for the condemned prisoners. He felt this was unseemly. ‘I complained about it to a prison official but was told that nothing could be done to stop it.'

His next duty was to meet the men and women he was due to hang. ‘I walked down the corridor and the thirteen Belsen faces were pressed close to the bars.' He was taken aback. ‘Never in my experience have I seen a more pitiable crowd of condemned prisoners.'

Pierrepoint had executed scores of people over the previous decade but he had never hanged thirteen in one day and nor had he hanged anyone quite so evil as these prisoners. He expressed a particular interest in meeting Irma Grese.

‘She walked out of her cell and came towards us laughing,' he wrote. ‘She seemed as bonny a girl as one could ever wish to meet.'

When he asked her age, she paused and gave a weak smile. Pierrepoint also found himself smiling, ‘as if we realised the conventional embarrassment of a woman revealing her age'.

The first of the criminals to be weighed and measured was Josef Kramer, who had killed thousands of victims. He was extremely sullen and answered Pierrepoint's questions with gruff reticence.

The next prisoner, Dr Fritz Klein, had killed 300 victims at a time: he had also killed individual inmates using hypodermic syringes. Pierrepoint found him full of energy and not a bit contrite. ‘[He] came walking briskly down the corridor and efficiently complied with the formalities.'

Once all the prisoners had been weighed, Pierrepoint had to work out the length of rope that would be needed to kill them. If the drop was too long, it would tear their heads off. If it was too short, it might not break their necks.

Pierrepoint arose at 6 a.m. on Friday 13 December 1945, the day of the executions. He decided to hang the women first, beginning with Irma Grese. She proved a model of calmness, walking slowly to the trap and standing on the white chalk mark.

‘As I placed the white cap over her head, she said in her languid voice: “Schnell.”' The trapdoor crashed from under her feet and her body twisted as the rope broke her neck. Pierrepoint's first prisoner was dead.

He hanged the two other women before pausing for a much-needed cup of tea. Then he set to work on the men, adjusting the scaffold so that he could kill them in pairs.

First to go were Josef Kramer and Fritz Klein. They were bound together and then roped by their necks. ‘I adjusted the ropes and flew to the lever,' recalled Pierrepoint. Twenty-five seconds later, both were dead.

And so it continued. It was dark by the time all the prisoners had been despatched. Pierrepoint was exhausted and in need of more conventional entertainment: he thoroughly enjoyed himself at the mess party that night.

He was proud to have hanged the ‘Beasts of Belsen': it had all gone like clockwork. He would subsequently be called to execute a further 190 Nazi war criminals, including Bruno Tesch, inventor of the gas Zyklon B.

Pierrepoint was a model of efficiency and liked to boast that he could get his clients from their cells to the gallows – and hang them – in under a minute.

He was eventually retired due to failing eyesight at the age of seventy-two. Home Office officials cancelled his contract when they learned that he almost sent his assistant through the trapdoor by mistake.

 

PART V

Get Me Out of Here!

I saw that a boiling red river was coming from another part of the hill and cutting off the escape of the people who were running from their houses
.
The whole side of the mountain seemed to open and boil down on the screaming people.

ACCOUNT OF HAVIVRA DA IFRILE, ONE OF THREE KNOWN SURVIVORS OF THE 1906 ERUPTION OF MOUNT PELÉE

 

13

Trapped on an Iceberg

Wilfred Grenfell had been in many dangerous situations, but none had been quite as precarious as his current one. He was adrift on a floating island of ice and being swept out towards the wild Atlantic Ocean.

The snow-covered coastline of Newfoundland lay far behind him; indeed it had faded to a distant smudge. Ahead lay only danger and death. Grenfell could already hear the sickening slush of sea-ice being ground to pulp by the waves. He knew it was only a matter of time before his own little island of ice would give way beneath him.

Grenfell had taken a huge risk in attempting to cross the ice-bound Newfoundland bay, but he was on a mission of the utmost urgency. He was required at the local hospital, where a young lad lay seriously ill with poisonous gangrene in his leg. The leg needed to be treated – and possibly amputated – if he was to have any chance of survival. In the wilds of rural Newfoundland, Grenfell alone could perform the operation.

The safest and most reliable route to the hospital was along the rough coast path. But it was arduous in winter, for it traversed rocky inlets and snow-bound ravines. Far quicker, though considerably more dangerous, was to cross the sea ice.

Grenfell's journey began well enough. He had the right equipment for crossing the ice, with a change of clothes, snowshoes, rifle and oilskins. He also had a team of six dogs who were to pull his
komatic
or heavy sledge.

But as he pushed out into the frozen bay he suddenly grew alarmed. The heavy swell was breaking the ice into blocks that were held together by wafer-thin skins. Some of these skins had melted, turning the blocks into floating islands known locally as ice-pans.

With considerable effort Grenfell managed to make it across to a stable island of ice. From here, it was a further four miles across slushy ice to the rocky headland. He set off undaunted and was close to the landing point when disaster struck. He suddenly found himself crossing ‘sish' – a slush-like porridge of ice. The ice-pans had completely disappeared.

One moment he was afloat; the next, he was sinking. ‘There was not a moment to lose. I tore off my oilskins, threw myself on my hands and shouted to my team to go ahead for the shore.'

But the dogs were as frightened as he was and they also began to sink in the slush, along with the sledge. Soon they were flailing in icy water ‘like flies in treacle'.

After swimming through the icy water, Grenfell managed to reach a lone ice-pan. With considerable difficulty, he pulled himself onto the ice and then managed to save his dogs as well. But the wind was now whipping off the land and dragging Grenfell's ice-pan relentlessly out to sea.

He was bitterly cold and had lost all his equipment. ‘I stood with next to nothing on, the wind going through me and every stitch soaked in ice water.' His only reassurance was the fact that he would meet with a mercifully quick death, for the sea temperature was close to freezing and the waves were mounting in height.

‘Immense pans of Arctic ice, surging to and fro on the heavy rolling seas, were thundering into the cliffs like medieval battering rams.'

Grenfell was a born survivor and now used every technique he had been taught. He cut off his moccasins and split them open in order to make a makeshift jacket.

Still freezing, he realized that his only course was to start killing the dogs. He made a slipknot from leather, pulled it over the neck of one of the animals to stop it from biting him and then stabbed it through the heart. He proceeded to hack off the skin and wrap the bloody pelt over his shoulders. He then killed two more dogs and used their skins to keep warm.

By now it was growing dark: he realized that he must have been adrift for many hours. He hadn't eaten for the entire day but managed to keep his hunger at bay by chewing a band of rubber.

Sheer willpower kept him alive through the icy night, with the wind whipping across the ice and causing frostbite in his feet. When the sun finally rose, he tied together the thigh-bones of his slaughtered dogs and slipped his shirt over the end, making a rudimentary flag. It was his last hope of being sighted.

He was by now in a sorry state: ‘my poor, gruesome pan was bobbing up and down, stained with blood and littered with carcasses and debris'.

He was unaware that he had been sighted shortly after dawn. A man on the cliffs had seen him drifting out to sea and raised the alarm. Now, rescue was on its way. Four men were rowing with tremendous effort through the slush, aware that their village comrade could not keep himself alive for much longer.

Grenfell didn't see them coming, for he was by now badly afflicted with snow blindness. The first thing he knew about his rescue was the cries of the men's voices.

‘As the man in the bow leaped from the boat onto my ice raft and grasped both my hands in his, not a word was uttered.' Grenfell knew that he'd had a very lucky escape. ‘We all love life,' he wrote in the account of his adventure. ‘I was glad to be back once more with a new lease of it before me.'

Grenfell was also able to bring a new lease of life to the sickly boy who was awaiting him. He went straight to the hospital and successfully operated on his gangrenous leg. The boy went on to make a full recovery.

 

14

Volcano of Death

It was as if someone had switched off the sun. At exactly 8.02 a.m. on 8 May 1902, the Caribbean town of Saint-Pierre was rocked by a cataclysmic explosion. The sky above Martinique was plunged into instant darkness and the volcano Mount Pelée could be heard to roar like a beast.

When the sky lightened for a moment, the inhabitants turned their gaze to the volcano. They were horrified by what they saw. A vast wall of molten rock was roaring towards them, gathering momentum as it cascaded down the steep slopes above the town. In its wake was an avalanche of superheated gas and dust. The temperature of the flow was in excess of 1,000ºC and was vaporizing everything in its path.

Among the 30,000 terrified inhabitants was Léon Compère-Léandre, a local shoemaker. He had been outside when the volcano spectacularly erupted. ‘I felt a terrible wind blowing, the earth began to tremble, and the sky suddenly became dark,' he later wrote. ‘I turned to go into the house, with great difficulty climbed the three or four steps that separated me from my room, and felt my arms and legs burning, also my body.'

As he collapsed in agony, four other people burst into the room, ‘crying and writhing with pain'. It was clear that they had suffered massive internal injuries from the noxious volcanic gases filling the air, even before the main avalanche arrived.

One of the victims was the young daughter of the Delavaud family, whose father had already sought refuge in Léon's house. She was in a terrible state and died almost immediately. The others struggled to their feet, coughing violently as they fled back outside in the hope of finding some avenue of escape.